Spinster (41 page)

In 1932, age seventy-two, Charlotte was diagnosed with inoperable breast cancer, and in 1934 George died unexpectedly. After his death, she flew to Pasadena, California, where she was taken
care of by her daughter and friends. Charlotte had vowed, in her early thirties, after nursing her mother through her death, never to inflict such an ordeal on her child, and before the year was out she decided it was finally time to take her own life.

On August 17, 1935, Charlotte Perkins Gilman covered her mouth with a handkerchief soaked in chloroform—the ultimate act of self-determination.

Or maybe I won't buy the Pink House, I decided.

When you find yourself at yet another crossroads, sorting out your best next step, it's as useful to know what you don't want as what you do. Yes, I was still speaking to myself in the language of inspirational posters. Imagination is not boundless; we all have limitations.

But I wanted to engage with the world, not retreat from it. That's why I'd chosen journalism to begin with. Being self-supporting was the furthest thing from a shield—it was my foundation and also my liberty.

And cities don't warp otherwise ordinary citizens. Arguably, by now it's the other way around. Over the past several decades an ever-swelling demographic of single people has remade the city in its own image, a seeming utopia of twenty-tour-hour bars and hotels and restaurants and shops and spas springing up to suit our every whim, to protect us from loneliness. No wonder studies show us that single people are happier in urban areas.

Only now, in Newburyport, geographically incapable of meeting up with every last person for drinks or dinner or lunch or coffee, could I see how enslaved I'd been to my social schedule, how freighted by an outsize sense of interpersonal obligation, just a few degrees away from a Victorian socialite paying her endless rounds of calls.

In order to find and do work I found meaningful, I had to radically rethink how I spent my time, and my money. I couldn't bear to tally up all the hours I toiled, particularly on meaningless assignments, and where that income went: not just rent and bills and student loans, or even clothes and haircuts and cosmetics, but the countless nights out at restaurants and bars, tipsily hailing taxis instead of taking the subway, all to the same end—keeping my social life in constant motion.

Charlotte showed me that we become adults by learning how to be responsible to ourselves, whether or not we're married or have children. I thought again of those classic architectural principles, balance and proportion.

In August I returned to Brooklyn and brought my new solitude with me. I went out less and focused more on the friendships that meant the most to me. I took an editing job on the condition I could work on my own writing from home one day a week. When an apartment opened up in my building, I convinced Willy to take it. Like me, she was still single. I thought we'd be even happier with our own neo-boardinghouse. I called it “The Home for Lively Spinsters.”

Credit 9.1

Note from Maeve Brennan to Edith Konecky, 1972

The quiet conviviality of a hotel bar at dusk, the room not yet full of patrons, the bartender liable to top off my vodka and seltzer because the night is young. Shielded by a book and low candle, near enough others to eavesdrop, far enough to not get involved. And upstairs, someone is tidying my room, smoothing the crisp pillowcases, wiping down the sink, leaving behind a fresh stack of white towels. Folded neatly in a drawer are a few sweaters
and skirts, two dresses hanging in the narrow closet—all that could fit in a single suitcase, just enough to get by, nothing less, nothing more.

It was January 2014, and I'd checked into a hotel overlooking Washington Square Park, where Maeve Brennan had once lived, to get a taste of hotel living. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's idea of “A Woman-at-Large” had returned me to Maeve. I'd never been able to shake the suspicion that her tragic demise was almost
too
tragic, too faithful to the age-old script that demands that a single woman be punished for her sins. Did her life really fall apart after she published “The Springs of Affection” in 1972? Or did Maeve, like Charlotte, simply veer in an unexpected direction, finding pleasure and sustenance in a different kind of living?

Of the many hotels she called home, this is one of the few remaining. Its fortunes have risen and fallen and risen again, along with those of Greenwich Village. It opened in 1902 as a handsome residential hotel called the Hotel Earle, grew into Art Deco grandeur, and by the '50s fell into disrepair—the perfect haven for the latest counterculture. In 1964, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez lived in room 305 (in her song “Diamonds and Rust” she recalls “that crummy hotel”).
*
The Byrds' Roger McGuinn took room 702. In the 1970s it was cleaned up and in 1986 rechristened with its current name, the Washington Square Hotel. Today the clientele is
largely international; over breakfast that morning I'd overheard at least four different languages.

The room was perfect—quiet, simple—and the food excellent. After one night I wanted to stay forever. Instead, when a snowstorm blew in, I extended my reservation from two nights to four, knowing that waking to a city blanketed in white would justify the expense, and it did. I spent the first day of the storm in bed reading, looking out the window, languishing in the knowledge that I was seeing the park as Maeve had in 1960, after ending her marriage and returning to the city.

She'd done what all of us—from the chambermaid wheeling the vacuum cleaner down the hall to the bar-back drying the highball glasses and placing them on the shelf—are supposed to do: she had married. And it hadn't worked out. In those days, being unmarried was “no small thing for a woman over forty,” Angela Bourke reminds us in her biography. Maeve was forty-two, a woman between countercultures, too young for the last and too old for the one blooming around her, though I doubt she'd have joined in anyhow. Her unconventionality never extended to bohemianism.

But she wasn't back where she'd started; she'd simply arrived where she'd left off, this time stronger and smarter and maybe even stripped of illusions. Which is a place we all must reach, like it or not.

During the twelve years she'd lived alone in the city before her marriage, she'd fashioned her own apprenticeship. She'd taught herself how to write and to see, to catch the details that make a story sing. She'd learned the subtle choreography of working with editors, how to allow another person into your own muddled, unspooling process and let him or her guide you without changing your course.

In that regard she was especially fortunate. Several months prior I'd visited the author and
New Yorker
writer Janet Malcolm at her home in Manhattan. Malcolm hardly knew Maeve,
who was seventeen years older than she, but her late husband, Gardner Botsford, was one of Maeve's most important editors (the two were exact contemporaries). She gave me a large envelope of Maeve's letters to Botsford, dating from the early and mid-1960s, after she'd left the hotel and was spending winters alone in East Hampton.

Drawing on my own experience, I wondered if Maeve's devotion to “surface” details had made her something of a perfectionist when it came to filing copy—good practice when writing short pieces, but antithetical to more probing and meandering endeavors, which require working through several rounds of rough drafts. For a woman who, at her professional heights, was known for pinning a fresh carnation to her lapel every day, filing unfinished work must have felt like the literary equivalent of going out for dinner at a nice restaurant while forgetting to wear shoes.

Typewritten on thin sheaves of pale blue and yellow paper, Maeve's letters to Botsford are long and chatty, brimming with observations of people they both know, anecdotes about her entourage of cats and Bluebell, her faithful Labrador retriever, as well as her reactions to books she's reading, thoughts about stories and reviews she's working on, updates on her progress. They reveal an astoundingly productive intimacy—that of the narrator's trust in her reader's interest, the implied agreement that she can be, well, as long-winded as she wants, both parties knowing that seeds for stories travel on such currents of air.

I was reminded of a line in Malcolm's celebrated book
The Journalist and the Murderer
: “A correspondence is a kind of love affair…. It is with our own epistolary persona that we fall in love, rather than with that of our pen pal.” Maeve's letters to Botsford
are
their relationship, a space where she could create, inhabit, and celebrate an identity that nurtured her in her solitude and fueled her writing process, and that, unlike her marriage, allowed her to flourish.

When it had occurred to me in 2013 that Maeve's niece, Yvonne Jerrold, must still be alive, I wasn't sure what to do. Angela Bourke had already interviewed Jerrold for the biography, and I couldn't imagine she had much more to say on the topic. Surely she wanted to be left well enough alone.

It's generally understood that Maeve suffered from schizophrenia, though Bourke never uses that term in her biography. (When I called to ask her why, she explained that her academic training makes her fastidious about not going beyond sources, and she'd never found one to confirm the diagnosis. Besides, she said, after the Vietnam War there were huge advances in psychopharmacology and people were “throwing labels around freely.” She thought a label that was being used then might not even be understood the same way today.)

Symptoms of schizophrenia usually start between the ages of sixteen and thirty; it's very uncommon to become schizophrenic after age forty-five. As those of us who have never experienced or witnessed schizophrenia firsthand know from popular media, it's among the most world-annihilating of mental disorders, involving hearing voices and other false sensory perceptions, delusions, mental incoherence. The majority of people who have schizophrenia struggle to take care of themselves, work, keep friendships, or maintain romantic attachments.

Unsurprisingly, the disease is widely mythologized. When Elyn Saks, a law professor and author of a memoir about her lifelong attempt to control schizophrenic symptoms with psychoanalysis, was diagnosed in her late twenties with “chronic paranoid schizophrenia with acute exacerbation,” she immediately thought of the “years of books and movies that presented people like me as hopelessly evil or hopelessly doomed.” In her memoir, she describes
how in an instant she foresaw a life of violence and delusion. “Maybe I'd end my life in an institution; maybe I'd
live
my life in an institution. Or become homeless, a bag lady whose family could no longer care for her,” she writes. “I'd be that wild-eyed character on the city sidewalk that all the nice baby-carriage-pushing mommies shrink away from.
Get away from the crazy lady
. I'd love no one; no one would love me.”

My heart broke when I read that line. I'd been trying to understand why it is that when women express their anxieties about the future—their “feared selves,” as Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius termed it—they often go straight to the crazy bag lady (and her “sister,” the cat lady). Often it's said in jest, but the crack is too pervasive to not be consequential. Why is
this
of all fates more terrifying than any other?

At first I thought it was simply that the specter of the crazy bag lady has been branded so deeply into the collective female consciousness that we're stuck with her. Now I realized I was wrong. What is haunting about the bag lady is not only that she is left to wander the streets, cold and hungry, but that she's living proof of what it means to not be loved. Her apparition will endure as long as women consider the love of a man the most supreme of all social validations.

I couldn't decide which was worse: that Maeve actually did become a schizophrenic bag lady and was never treated effectively, or that she'd remained sane but somehow, for some reason, allowed her life to go so completely off the rails.

And yet, how much of her “story” is reality, and how much is a projection of what all of us who aspire to a better life fear? Certainly she'd fallen from a glamorous height, failed in the most traditional sense. But did that necessarily mean she'd been unhappy?

For a while I contentedly held on to this question, taking comfort in the possibility it presented, afraid to risk digging deeper,
only to discover once and for all that I was completely wrong, and Maeve really did end up miserable and alone.

Eventually, of course, curiosity won out.